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Space

Intergalactic subway: All aboard the wormhole express

By Marcus Chown

7 March 2012

New Scientist Default ImageReturn ticket to Andromeda, please

Video: What it would look like to travel through a wormhole

IT IS not every day that a piece of science fiction takes a step closer to nuts-and-bolts reality. But that is what seems to be happening to wormholes. Enter one of these tunnels through space-time, and a few short steps later you may emerge near Pluto or even in the Andromeda galaxy millions of light years away.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that no one has yet come close to constructing such a wormhole. One reason is that they are notoriously unstable. Even on paper, they have a tendency to snap shut in the blink of an eye unless they are propped open by an exotic form of matter with negative energy, whose existence is itself in doubt.

Now, all that has changed. A team of physicists from Germany and Greece has shown that building wormholes may be possible without any input from negative energy at all. “You don’t even need normal matter with positive energy,” says Burkhard Kleihaus of the University of Oldenburg in Germany. “Wormholes can be propped open with nothing.”

The findings raise the tantalising possibility that we might finally be able to detect a wormhole in space. Civilisations far more advanced than ours may already be shuttling back and forth through a galactic-wide subway system constructed from wormholes. And eventually we might even be able to use them ourselves as portals to other universes.

Wormholes first emerged in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which famously shows that gravity is nothing …

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